Tuesday, August 29, 2017

This years team problem features Indonesian and emojis. The teams in Dublin had 3 hours for 4 people to solve this problem, can you and your friends do it? Or how about attempting it solo in 12 hours :)?

We will release the solutions to the team problem in about a week, letting you have a stab at it first. Good luck!

Monday, August 28, 2017

Lately we've had several people point out problems in the Hall of Fame of IOL, the page that tracks rare achievements among contestants and teams. These errors always stem from multiple versions of the name of a given person. For example, one year a contestant has been listed with all middle names and another year with only the name of address. Our database of results is not able to understand that this is the same person, and therefore the person does not appear in the Hall of Fame.If you have won more than one medal, or if all the members of your team won a medal in the individual, and your name is not listed in the Hall of Fame - please let us know.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

The solutions to the problems of the individual contest have now been uploaded! How did you do? Let us know in the comments how well you did at solving the problems without having access to the solutions. The team problems will be released soon, hold on :)!Bruno L'Astoria, author of problem #3 on Kimbundu, has kindly shared the slides of his presentation from Dublin. You can find them here.
Kimbundu is an Altantic-Congo (Bantu) language of Angola. There were a lot of slaves taken from this region of Africa to Brazil for forced labour to produce goods for Europe. Brazilian Portuguese is different from European Portuguese, and there is a long discussion on the influence of different African languages on its development. Kimbundu is one of the languages that is believed to have had a significant influence on the development of Brazilian Portuguese.

Birom is also an Atlantic-Congo language, but of a different branch: Plateau and it is spoken in Nigeria. Nigeria is one of the most linguistically diverse countries on the planet, it is estimated that over 500 languages are spoken there! Atlantic-Congo* is the largest language family in the world, with over 1,400 members!

For more information on how people did solving these two problems, insights from the authors etc, please see the presentation slides :)!

*There are two different names for this family, you might be more familiar with "Niger-Congo" than "Atlantic-Congo". They are different, and have different members. It all depends on how far back you believe that you can reconstruct this family. Glottolog is more conservative and uses "Atlantic-Congo", while Ethnologue is more inclusive and uses the label "Niger-Congo". One of the largest differences in the members of these two groups is whether or not to include Mande languages. "Niger-Congo" includes Mande, but "Atlantic-Congo" does not include Mande languages. Both of these labels include Bantu languages, the largest subgroup with over 600 languages.

You can submit your suggested solutions down below in the comments of this blogpost if you want, that way they'll be time-stamped and we can compare them to the solutions when they are published ;)!Solvers Choice Awards: Tae Hun Lee and the problem on Laven language and Khom script
Contrary to speculations by LNNO, the member of the Problem Committee who received the Solver's Choice awards was not Ksenia Gilyarova, but Tae Hun Lee. He received the award for problem number 4, which was about the language Laven (Jru') and the Khom script. Laven (Jru') is an Austroasiatic language spoken in Laos by approximately 28,000 people. The Khom script was used for this language from 1924 to 1936.

The Khom script was invited by Ong Kommandam and used in the rebellion by the hill Mon-Khmer groups ("Khom") against French and Lao rule. In an article in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, linguist Paul Sidwell writes:

The script was used by a political leader as part of his resistance effort against the colonial French, used to symbolize his power more than to communicate factual content. The script is unique in the way it has separate symbols for... <text hidden because spoiler>

Monday, August 7, 2017

This years olympiad has finished, but the next one is already gearing up! The 16th International Olympiad in Linguistics will take place in Prague, Czech Republic on the 26th -30th of July 2018.

Vítáme vás!

Prague. Tuomas Lehtinen, Getty images.

The hosts are the Faculties of Arts and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University and the venue is the University of Life Sciences. Vojta Diatka, who has been a team leader for the Czech delegation for many years now, is leading the local organizing team.

P.S. The problem sets will soon be uploaded in all the languages of the contest. We will upload the problems first, and one week later the solutions. That way, you can all try your hand at solving them without being able to look up the correct solution!